Summer in anglophone central Canada starts very seriously on Canada Day, July 1. It is so highly valued because it lasts only two months and a few more days at best. Labour Day, which falls on Monday, September 4 this year, is the very serious end of it all. Soon almost everyone in the region […]
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is slyly asking people to grade new minority Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first five months in office, on what passes in English-speaking Canada for national TV. In our book Mr. Harper himself could be graded as high as C+. Whatever else, he has at least tried to gain ground […]
George Orwell (1903-1950) was such an interesting political writer partly because he lived through so many troubling issues of both his and our day in his own life. Reading about the human rights activist Charm Tong’s June 2006 visit to Canada, at least, is likely to make anyone who has read the book remember Orwell’s […]
SATURDAY, JUNE 17. GRAND BEND. Southwestern Ontario is the part of Ontario that is least like what some people think Ontario is like. Right now it is most famous for the aggressive Six Nations Iroquois land-claim protest in Caledonia, Haldimand County, and the Bandidos biker massacre near Shedden and Iona Station in Elgin County. And […]
If you’re wondering just how bad the true north could be in any hypothetical new Conservative majority age of Stephen Harper, check out Paul Jackson’s column in the June 13 Calgary Sun. It’s called “Nation of sheep: If Harper can’t turn it around there’s little hope for Canada.” It seems a good guess that the […]
TORONTO, SUNDAY, JUNE 11. US historian Richard Hofstadter’s article on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first appeared in Harper’s magazine in November 1964. Canadians who live in the alleged new “hotbed of Islamic extremism“Â can be excused for remembering this 1960s landmark, at the end of the first full week of the “Canada terror plot” […]
